A Letter To Amy
by Charlie's Mum
Summary: This is a one-shot story. In brief, it is about bullying. It is a letter to a Hogwarts student from her grandmother (re-submitted with some slight changes)


This is just a little something that popped into my head after reading someone's Live Journal Post about bullying. I'm working completely from memory here, so I may have gotten the some of the names slightly wrong. Feel free to let me know how wrong I was. "Amy" is a character that I completely made up, but everyone else has been mentioned in the books.

Standard Disclaimer – I own nothing except my feeble imagination. JK Rowling is responsible for the wonderful Potterverse That I hope I am remaining true to!

Dear Amy:

You mother told me today that she received an owl from Professor Dumbledore regarding you and your friends' behaviour towards a girl in your year, a Luna Lovegood. Now, I'm not going to repeat what your mother said in her Howler; you are a smart girl, and I know you can do better. No, what I wanted to do is tell you a little of my own experience, and what it taught me, in hopes perhaps you'll learn the lesson a bit earlier and better than I ever did.

When I was at Hogwarts there was a girl in my year whom no one liked. She was whiney, and she wore glasses, and seemed to burst into tears at the least little thing. My friends and I thought she was a joke, and we made sure she knew it. We picked on her when she answered questions wrong in class, and we picked on her when she answered them right. We made fun of her glasses; we tripped her as she walked out of the Great Hall. We were horrible. I of course didn't think I was being horrible, I thought I was being witty. Every time I said something to this girl that my friends thought was funny, I felt good about myself. I'm sure you know what I mean.

As we got older, things didn't change. Your mother told me she hoped that, now that you are in your sixth year, you would no better but I know differently. It's easy to forget that other people have the same kind of feelings you have. When our Headmaster Dippet confronted us about our teasing, we would tell him that it was only in fun; that she knows we're joking, that we weren't doing any harm. Poor old Professor Dippet, he meant well, but he didn't always see what was going on in front of his face. He always wanted to believe the best in everyone. That caused quite a few problems when I was in my fifth year.

My fifth year…It's hard to talk of, even now, but you need to know what I did, what I was responsible for. It is shameful, and what's worse, it wasn't even until years later that even began to feel sorry for what I had done. At any rate, fifth year, as you well know, is very hard what with studying for OWLS and trying to decide what you wanted to do with the rest of your life, and for my friends and me our outlet was still picking on that one poor girl, and I, I'm ashamed to say, was spurred on to even greater acts of maliciousness by the attention of a boy. He was handsome, smart- a Prefect, and I noticed him smiling at me every time I did anything particularly vicious. One day during Charms he actually spoke to me, and I could _feel_ the envy of every other girl in the room. We chatted about trivial things for a few minutes, my mind barely registering what was being said, and my heart nearly bursting with joy at being talked to by this handsome, popular boy. Then he leaned closer to me and whispered, 'I see what you do to that Mudblood. Good for you. Their kind doesn't belong here.' Recently the school had been plagued with a series of mysterious attacks on Muggle born students - the same kind of attacks, in fact, you told me happened at Hogwarts during your first year. What he said to me should have horrified me to my very core, but it didn't. Amy, I smiled and said thank you. I thanked him! Because he was the handsome, smart and popular Tom Riddle, I thought more of the fact he was complimenting me than what he was complimenting me for. Today, of course, I am ashamed of this, but then, I didn't care.

Not long after that, right after we took our OWLS, I decided to let off steam by taunting that poor girl about her glasses again. She just blinked at me, staring with a stupid expression on her face, then burst into tears, as she always did, and ran out of the common room. We laughed, and went on to play a few rounds of Exploding Snap. That was the last time I ever saw her. That evening we were informed that the mysterious attacker had struck again, and she was dead. She was found in the bathroom where she always went to cry after we'd – after I picked on her, and she died there.

And the horrible thing was, I still didn't feel like it was my fault. I was sorry she was dead, of course, but it still didn't occur to me that I had, in a way, contributed to her death, even after she spent the next several years haunting me every waking minute for the next few years until the Ministry stepped in and made her go back to haunting the toilet where she died. It wasn't until much, much later, when the Dark Lord started rising to power, did I finally understand what I had done, and how responsible I was for ruining someone's life.

You see, Amy, The Dark Lord was able to gather followers because he told them what they wanted to believe; that other people weren't the same as they are, that they didn't feel the same way, or think the same way. Seeing several of my friends killed by Death Eaters finally brought the lesson home to me.

When my friends laughed at my jokes, when Tom Riddle complimented me on my cleverness, I didn't think of what I was doing to that girl – to Myrtle. She wasn't real to me, because I never got to know her as a real person. To me she was just some object to ridicule, to hurt. This is what Death Eaters do, Amy, and it is what I did, and it is what you are doing to Luna Lovegood.

So, it's too late for me to atone for what I did. I tried to talk to Myrtle once when I was visiting Hogwarts, but ghosts are doomed to live a sort of half-life as the people they were when they died, and therefore Myrtle couldn't forgive me for what I had done. I take comfort therefore, in knowing it isn't too late for you. I don't expect you to become Luna's best friend, but I want you to think of her as a person, a real person with feelings just like yours.

The coming of this second war means we all have to stand together as people if we are to defeat the darkness You Know Who threatens to bring. You're a good, bright girl, Amy, and I know you'll heed my words. Don't make the same mistakes I did, my darling. I want to spare you that pain.

Be safe, and I will see you at Christmas break. Your loving,

Grandmother Olive


End file.
